Skillcity.cn is a P2P University With Courses That Are Actually Interesting
It’s an idea that most internet users have seen before: an online training center that capitalizes on its students to serve as both teachers and pupils. You sign up for an account and then you can set up your own class to share your skills with others, or just browse the available classes and see what skills you can learn. That’s the idea behind Skillcity.cn, and it’s true that it isn’t the most original idea ever. But what this Chinese startup lacks in originality it makes up for in execution.
教師と生徒の両方の役割を果たすために、その生徒を生かしたオンライントレーニングセンター：それは、ほとんどのインターネットユーザーは前に見たことがあるでしょう。あなたのアカウントにサインアップしてから、他の人とあなたのスキルを共有する独自のクラスを設定することができ、あるいは単に利用可能なクラスを参照し、何を学ぶことができるかのスキルを参照してください。それはSkillcity.cnの背後にある考え方だし、それはそれは、これまでで最もオリジナルのアイデアではないことは事実です。しかし、何この中国のスタートアップは、オリジナリティには、実行中の埋め合わせに欠ける。
As you can see from the screenshot, the site’s design is clean, modern, and focused, which makes it very easy to find your way around. The process of setting up an account, choosing interests and registering a class to teach (if you want) is straightforward, and Skillcity wisely allows users to log in with their existing social media accounts (like Sina Weibo and Renren) rather than forcing them to sign up for yet another new account.
But a site like this lives or dies on the classes it offers, and this is where Skillcity breaks away from the competition a little. In a few similar sites I’ve run into over the years, most of the courses offered are in computer science. That’s not a huge surprise — this is the internet, after all — but it definitely limits the appeal of a training site when the only courses available are PHP, Advanced PHP and Python. Skillcity has some coding classes, of course, but its offerings are pretty diverse overall.
I found classes in tennis, car maintenance, swimming, playing the erhu, photography, money management, outdoor survival, and digital video, as well as more esoteric offerings like “the history of cocktails” and “uncovering street scams.” And that was just in the first few pages!
Of course, whether or not the teachers are any good is another story entirely — teaching is not as easy as most people think — but in all honesty, if I lived in the right location I’d be tempted to sign up for a few of these classes. As you might guess from the diversity of topics, Skillcity also seems to have a good number of users for a new startup, so the class offerings should only grow as time goes on. If you want to learn a new skill, this looks like a great place to do it. And if you want to teach something, Skillcity looks like the kind of site that will be attracting a lot of students once it becomes more widely known. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.
